partnership rankings 1996-2009

[pdmunro]

http://www.rpbridge.net/9x65.htm

[hrothgar]

Interesting

 

Here's an email that I just fired off

 

I was very interested in the partnership ranks that you computed and have listed at:  http://www.rpbridge.net/9x65.htm

 

I was curious whether it would be practical for you to calculate some additional statistics that might help explain some of the information that you've already provide.

 

From my own perspective, I'm particularly interested in understanding how the auction impacts some of the basic descriptive statistics.

For example, Bocchi - Duboin seem to score well in terms their Set%.  Its difficult to tell whether this is a function of particularly skillful defense or, alternatively, whether the auctions that they defend are substantively different.

 

Personally, I've be interested in understand

 

1.  The frequency with which the partnership declares / defends different contracts

2.  A frequency distribution of the number of bids required to reach contract "X" (both for competitive and non competitive auctions)

 

Ideally, it would be great to see some cross tabs to see how the auction style impacted declarer play / defense...

 

Regardless, thanks for taking the time to post the data that you do have available...

[JanM]

Two additional comments:

 

1. It would be very interesting to have data on whether the IMPs won/lost are primarily because the other table was in a different contract or because of the number of tricks taken. That's part of Richard's "bidding history" of course.

 

2. As Pavlicek points out, the pair at the other table has a major effect on results. I'd add that for results from Round Robins, team strategy is also important. For example, suppose you have a sponsored team where the pro pairs are a solid, down the middle pair and a more volatile pair. The right strategy for the Round Robin is surely to play the client pair against weaker teams, which will inflate their IMP score (note that client pairs usually do well on Butler rankings at the World Championships). More interesting is the choice of which of the other two pairs plays against which other teams. Both of them will play against the top teams of course. I think that most NPCs would tend to play the volatile pair against the weakest teams and the solid pair against the middle teams. That's because in the Round Robin you want to maximize your IMPs against the weakest teams, and you're most likely to be able to do that by playing the volatile pair against them. So for Round Robins, I'd expect to see the client pair do best, the volatile pair next best and the middle of the road pair worst of the three.

 

Of course, this doesn't have much effect on Pavlicek's numbers because not many of the World Championship Round Robin matches have been shown on Vugraph, and none of the US Trials Round Robin matches are shown (we worry about security). But probably these results do include the European Championships, which are completely Round Robins, so the results for the European pairs may be somewhat a result of strategy decisions. For instance, I'd expect Lauria-Versace, a "solid" pair, to play against generally better opponents than Fantoni-Nunes, a "swingy" pair.